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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a